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Friday, March 12, 2010

Belated Introductions

Belatedly, I have joined the ranks of the great unread and have started keeping a blog. Like playing my scales on the piano, I will write on a regular schedule and keep myself in disciplined trim for the larger projects that will eventually loft me into the realm of the great unpublished.

This blog will, in time, have a slightly more interesting layout (I am NOT a minimalist. I have learned to live with that. It's not a particularly fashionable vogue for an architect at the present moment, but in my blog I can go as rococo as I please!) but I'm still working out this whole html thing and I'm setting no schedule. Mr. Tabubil is taking the tough-love route and refusing to help me unless I'm completely in over my head, so I'm going to have to learn it all myself. (Which is his goal and he smiles smugly. Intellectually I appreciate his approach, but from a selfish point of view it's inordinately frustrating to have someone perfectly handy sit on the sofa whistling and writing technical support answers to internet forums while you growl in frustration and have the *wah wah META* notice flash at you - again - when you hit post. I HATE balancing on my own two feet when there's someone next to me who knows how to use a pogo stick.)

I figure to write about my corner of Australia - the big skies, the red horizons, the rain that falls on our tin roof like thunderstones, and the spaces that are so vast, maps fall out of scale and a planned morning drive along three sides of a triangle turns into three corners on five hundred kilometers of straight road.

Things will drift off topic. I obsess over art and architecture and I adore the mannerists of the sixteenth century because they thought on the slant and taught space how to breathe.

I love fashion - particularly the unwieldy sculptural fashions of the rococo and the mid-nineteenth century and twentieth centuries - it's all architecture, just different scales for clothing our bodies.

I adore high tack - I lust for doorways dribbling beaded curtains painted with Hawaiian luau maidens and I dream of one day living in an apartment with a balcony carpeted in astroturf, with tiki torches, pink flamingoes on sticks and paper lanterns hanging from the roof.

(There is a plaster flamingo on a stick at Cheap as Chips - our local Walmart equivalent - but Mr. Tabubil is exercising his marital veto. In a town where lawn ornaments are a competitive sport, I think he's being somewhat narrow-minded, but I can't sell him on the concrete meerkat either.) Big Sky:

About Me

I am an Australian architect, married to a Canadian who followed me home.
In September 2011 we relocated from rural South Australia to the bustling metropolis of Santiago, Chile, where it's warmer than Canada, but less insect-y than Australia.
How's that for a compromise?